


fly in the sea with no gravity to pull me down

by bamboozledone



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Boy Genius!Derek, Continuum AU, F/M, M/M, Protector!Stiles, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-11
Updated: 2014-01-11
Packaged: 2018-01-08 09:14:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1130849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bamboozledone/pseuds/bamboozledone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles Stilinski is a Protector from 2077 who is unwillingly sent back to 2012. Derek Hale is the grumpy genius in his head when he gets there. Syfy/Showcase's 'Continuum' AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	fly in the sea with no gravity to pull me down

**Author's Note:**

> The story will probably make a little more sense if you've actually watched the first season of 'Continuum', but, that being said, it's not really necessary, since I deviate substantially from the show and its logic and the character motivations. And THAT being said, you should watch the show if you haven't because it's totally kickass and Erik Knudsen is the most adorable thing that's ever existed and Rachel Nichols is so beautiful it hurts.
> 
> Warning: I have about 30,000 words written and no end in sight. Almost everything was written pre-season 3. I'm hoping that by posting a little bit now I will feel the inspiration to actually finish it up. 
> 
> Things that appear to not be mine are probably not mine. Obviously.
> 
> Title is from Phillip Phillips' song 'Man on the Moon'.

 

It's just a routine execution, they tell him when Stiles gets shoved into the chamber, but then again, executions are far from routine in the Beacon District. The Corporations are very clear on the method of punishment for anybody who commits an act of Treason against the Corporate Congress: Executions, to be made public by Televised Event, utilizing the Magnet. The Magnet was developed by HaleCorp nearly thirty years ago, a painless, yet effective way to end lives without the commonplace blood and gore and mental discomfort for the viewing public. You touch it, and that's it. Farewell, and into the Big Beyond.

 

But the fact of the matter is that an execution has not been held in the Beacon District in nearly twenty years, not since the earliest and darkest days of the Transition, and Stiles can't focus on anything but that fact as he watches the eight orange suited figures walk quietly into the room. The other armed guards all raise their heads, standing at attention.

 

"I can't believe you're just standing there," the first one, Scott McCall, hisses from his place around the Magnet. "I thought you were better than that, Stiles."

 

"He never was," a flame-haired girl calls from the other side of the Magnet. Even with her slight hands wrapped behind her back in titanium cuffs, she looks dangerous, like she could topple an empire with one flick of her long red fingernails.  "Coward back then, coward right now."

 

Stiles wonders for a moment why he, of all the CPS guards, was placed here, why put him, Stiles Stilinski, Rank 3, in the actual execution chamber. It's not as if he's not replaceable. He has no special qualities or features that make him more fit for this task than any other person who drew duty tonight. In fact, it's quite the opposite. It's all in his File, that he knows these people, went to school with them when he was a child. He even went to training with Scott to be a Protector before a Rogue group Changed Scott's mother, in some dark alley right outside the city limits. She had come home half-dead and Scott had stopped calling, stopped showing his face during the daylight hours, until...

 

Stiles shakes his head of the minutia of memories as the Executioner, a stout man with a hard face and cold eyes, strides into the room. He can hardly be called an Executioner, as he does nothing in the way of actual execution, merely reads a pre-written statement, discussing what it means to be a Traitor to the Union, and enumerating all the acts that have brought these eight prisoners to this place for this dark purpose.

 

He sees his father milling about the gallery outside the chamber, chatting with a few well-groomed couple Global Corporate Congressmen. His father looks uncomfortable, like the whole thing isn't sitting right with him. Stiles isn't surprised: His father has always been sympathetic to the plight of those he calls "underrepresented". Stiles doesn't like talking with him about it.

 

Allison, the smallest person in the group, with brown hair and the hollow brown eyes spits on his back when he turns back toward the Magnet. "This what you want, Stilinski? Want to watch the Movement burn?" She struggles against her own restraints until a female Protector knees her in the back and forces her closer to the Magnet.

 

"Should have called in sick," Stiles mutters as he wipes the dampness off his neck. One of the other  Protectors, a broad guy that Stiles has never seen before, smirks. "I had vacation time coming up, and like a sucker I agreed to overtime for a couple more Credits that I don't even need."

 

The other Protector chuckles, put his hand on his firearm with practiced care when Allison thrashes against the force of the Protector behind her. "You should take the compliment, Stilinski. They don't usually let rookies in on assignments this important."

 

"Not a rookie," Stiles grumbles.

 

The other Protector smirks. "You look sixteen."

 

The Executioner finally starts talking, tapping on a body microphone until the gallery goes silent and still. "Liber8, you have been sentenced to Execution on this day in 2077. Your crimes, too numerous in volume to be described in detail here, will be signified by the most recent and most costly: Your destruction of Global Corporate Congress headquarters in the Beacon District. Your actions have cost the lives of almost three thousand innocents, both Changed and Unchanged, and for that alone, this Execution goes forward today."

 

There are some bright flashes from outside the chamber when the members of Liber8 move forward, their hands pressed up against the Magnet. The Press, Stiles assumes vaguely. He thinks he might end up making he front page of the HaleCorp news release tomorrow morning.

 

Stiles hears the whirring, and remembers from his morning briefing that the sound it normal. The Execution is supposed to be a little grinding as the Magnet engages, a quick flash of light and that's it. Lives end, movements die with their champions. That's the way the Corporate Congress does things here, so quick and efficient that you don't expect the change until it's already happened

 

But then there is a sound, at first like the shudder of grass under a light breeze, devolving into the scream of gale winds against the jagged rocks of the structurally sophisticated skyscrapers that dot the Beacon District skyline. And rather than light, there's nothing at all as Stiles staggers forward, stumbles into the abyss.

 

\---

 

Stiles comes to in a pool of rainwater.

 

Well, he thinks it's rainwater. There's not really enough rain in the Beacon District to give anything but a light dusting of mist occasionally, but Stiles thinks he saw pictures of rain puddles in a filthy book in the library his father likes to frequent that the Corporate Congress intends to bulldoze next month. He does know that he's lying down on the side of a road, because he can smell wet pavement. For a moment it occurs to Stiles that this could be some hallucination, perhaps a side effect of the radiation emitted from the Magnet. He sniffs the air, thinks he smells some foreign vegetation in his vicinity. He taps helplessly on his backup Communicator, hearing nothing but a staticky buzz in his ear.

 

"Hello?" he screams into the receiver. He is rewarded with the strong thump of feedback against his eardrum. "You guys in Tech Support keep getting worse and worse. Did CPS get cheap and start outsourcing again? Hello? Hello?"

 

There's a rough sound on the other end of the line. It takes a second for Stiles to recognize the noise as a growl. A Wolf, then. Stiles can deal with a Wolf.  "What the hell are you doing on my frequency, kid?"

 

He taps the receiver again (something his superiors at CPS have always discouraged him from doing, but which Stiles did anyway). "Wait, say that again?"

 

"This is my frequency. Get off of it."

 

"Your frequency?" Stiles barks, hitting the receiver full on this time. The Wolf on the other end of the line growls again. "This is the CPS frequency, and unless you're some new guy running point back at the Headquarters, you need to get off the line. You're in violation of at least seventeen codes right now, and that's before the part where you're a total idiot."

 

"Are you high?" the voice asks. Stiles can't tell if he (Stiles thinks it's a he anyway) is being serious or just being an asshole.

 

"No, I'm not high." Stiles doesn't touch the stuff. Much.

 

"Are you a hacker? Or someone from the government trying to buy my research again? Because I am not going to sell my tech to you yet, I told you that the last twenty times you came to my house and harassed my family."

 

This time there's a genuine sense of fury in his voice. Stiles doesn’t dwell on it, because there are better things for him to worry about right now. "You're on the Beacon District City Police Service frequency." Stiles recites, hoping that some sense of authority is in his tone. He’s done this before with newbies. "I don't know if you hacked in by accident or as some sort of bizarre dare, but you need to turn off your connection immediately if you don't want the Prosecutor's Office to come after you for Misuse of Government Property."

 

"Beacon..." The voice trails off. "Beacon Hills has a Sheriff's Department. It's not a big enough town for an actual police department."

 

"Beacon District has had a CPS division since 2040. They got rid of the Sheriff's Department in 2055." Stiles knows these dates by heart: His father had been the Sheriff for a year before the Union had decided to close the money pit that was the law keeping office. His father had landed on his feet, but he still kept his Sheriff's uniform in the back of his closet, next to his late wife's wedding dress.

 

The voice growls again. "You really are high."

 

"Look, I don't know exactly what you're trying to accomplish by hacking into the CPS line, but I really don't want to report you for..."

 

And that's when Stiles notices it, standing behind him, away from the pavement. The green sign, half-lit in the dark of the moonlight. _Welcome to Beacon Hills_! it pronounces in long, italic white letters. There are yellow flowers growing around the base of the wooden sign post, and litter scattered across the low-lying brush.

 

"Seriously. What sort of sick joke it this?" Stiles blinks twice and sees a newspaper on the ground, and, heart racing until he can barely breathe, picks it up with his shaking hands. The paper is small and thin and just a little bit damp, with a proud _Beacon Hills Gazette_ printed in red on the top of each page in ten point font. There's a photo of a couple men on the front page, proclaiming that they got the first buck of the season, and a couple fliers for self-help meetings at the Beacon Hills free clinic on the corner of Western and Main. On the back page there's an article about the 2012 Beacon Hills lacrosse team taking State, and directions to the regional match next month in Colorado.

 

_Colorado_ _?_

 

Colorado was absorbed into the Salt Lake Union in 2066. Colorado hasn't existed for over ten years.

 

Stiles drops the paper like it's burning his hands. "You're definitely going to think I'm high when I ask my next question. But you're going to do me a big, huge favor and pretend that I'm actually asking a perfectly reasonable question, and ergo, you will give me perfectly reasonable answer. _Capicé_?"

 

The guy growls again. Stiles is going to take it as an affirmation because it doesn't seem like the Wolf on the other end of the line is really the chatty type.

 

"What year is it?"

 

The guy on the other line laughs. It's a rough sound, unnecessarily sexy, and Stiles lets it wash out some of the mounting anxiety that's been growing in his stomach since they opened the door to the execution chamber and the guard led Scott McCall into the room.

 

"2012." The voice's steady tone does nothing to settle Stiles' nerves.

 

\---

 

The first time someone tried to Bite Stiles, he nearly passed out.

 

He was sixteen and she was twenty-one, with sparking green eyes and a wicked sense of humor. He met her at a party where he got drunk on three watered-down beers and she took body shots off a blonde with supple breasts and lips. When she shoved Stiles against the wall with her Wolf strength and started nipping at his mouth, he didn't say no.

 

Stiles knew that it was just a game to her. It was how lots of Changed amused themselves in their twenties. Seeing how many Unchanged they could get to take the Bite became a pastime for them ten years ago. Before, it was frowned up. The Bite used to be a deeply personal choice. Now, it was nothing more than a fact of life in the Union.

 

"You're going to do it eventually," she insisted with her fangs against her neck, unbuttoning the fly on his jeans as she wormed her hands, slightly clawed, into his boxers. "Everyone does. Might as well get it done sooner rather than later and make the experience as..." She punctuated her words with a twist of her wrist. "Pleasant as it can be."

 

A shiver went though his body. For a moment, it seemed like a good idea. Wolves are stronger, faster, carry a higher level of prestige than the Unchanged around them. It's not just a good idea, it's a fucking fantastic idea. Then again, everything seems like a good idea when a hand is wrapped around his dick, especially when it's not his own.

 

"Can't," he panted into her mouth. "Mom died from it. Fifty percent chance I'll..." Twist, pull, twist, pull. "That I'll die too."

 

"Come on," she says again. Pull, pull, pull. "It's worth it to try."

 

She got him prone on a bed in somebody's room and started tugging at his jeans. In her haste, her claws dug into his bare thigh, slicing at the tender flesh.

 

"Fuck!" he swore as he saw his blood start to roll onto the white sheets. "Oh fuck."

 

The girl just smiled, pulled her top off to reveal an expanse of nothing underneath. It was the first time Stiles had seen a girl without a her shirt on, and, for another moment, the blood pulsing for him body doesn't seem nearly as important as getting his hands all over her body.

 

But then she smiled as she moved down his body, sinister, and he saw her fangs along the skin of his belly. The fantasy was over.

 

"Please," he struggled to get out as she bent her head, mouth hovering. "Please, get off me."

 

The Wolf raised her head, just the slightest flash of red illuminating her irises. With an indignant snort, she pushed herself up onto her hands and knees, collecting her shirt from above Stiles' head and pulled it on, visibly angry, before moving off the bed and onto the floor.

 

"Fucking Unchanged," she growled. She slammed the door on her way out.

 

Stiles had a hangover and his virginity completely in tact when he woke up in the morning. He was only a little disappointed.

 

\---

 

Stiles takes awhile to mull things over. He sits on the wet dirt because he doesn't have anything better to do. His right index finger makes absent circles in the ground as he grasps for things he knows: He is a Protector. His name is Stiles Stilinski. His was born in 2053. He's in 2012. Liber8 is probably here to. And, perhaps paramount to everything he does know, does _not_ know why any of this happened.

 

_Fuck._

 

"Are you going to have a nervous breakdown?" the guy in his head asks. His irritation is palpable through the comm connection. "Let me know if you are so I can call an ambulance or something."

 

"It would be my God-given right to have one if I want to," Stiles retorts. He makes no move to leave because, honestly, where does he have to go? "But no, I'm not going to have a nervous breakdown."

 

"Wait," the voice commands. Stiles can just make out a couple clicks in the background. "It just rained a hour ago. Get off the ground."

 

For some reason unbeknownst, this streak of bossiness makes Stiles smile. "I assume that means you're seeing what I'm seeing."

 

Stiles imagines the guy nodding in lieu of a yes or no response. He sounds like that sort of person anyway. "Yes. Now get off the ground."

 

"You're kind of a dick, you know that?" The connection is fuzzy, sound whimpering in and out of Stiles head as it starts to drizzle. Stiles really does need to get out of here. His suit might be good for surveillance, but he never got the upgrade for rainy conditions. "Human out of time here, a little sympathy might be in order."

 

"Why do I need to be sympathetic? You don't seem as surprised as you should be."

 

"Um, trust me, I'm as shocked as is reasonably appropriate. And look who's talking! You're taking the whole "person from the future" card a little too well if you ask me."

 

Stiles isn't surprised because his father, despite signing what is probably tantamount to a novels worth of confidentiality and nondisclosure agreements, likes to tell Stiles the sorts of things he sees at his job as head of security at a major corporation. His favorite department to frequent is the applied physics department. The Corporation is currently working on a device to manipulate the time-space continuum. Purely hypothetical at this point, his father had said. Stiles supposes that it's not quite as hypothetical as his father supposed.

 

"Yeah well." The voice trails off. "Everything is hypothetical until it isn't. Time travel makes sense on that level. It was only a matter of time before someone made it a reality."

 

"But time travel doesn't explain how we're talking. Or how you connected to this frequency or know how to work the HUD."

 

"It's my invention. Not on the market, and there's no way that you could access it without my tech. Nobody knows about my tech, not even my family. Private server. Basically unhackable. And it's not even completed yet. I have at least another five years in development before I can go public. So I must have given it to you at some point. Sometime in the future."

 

"You created the technology." Stiles' mouth drops open a little bit. "You? You created it?"

 

"How did you...that's going into a patent!" the voice says, temper flaring. "Don't make me sue you!"

 

It all slams together before Stiles has a chance to stop it. "Oh holy shit, you're Derek Hale."

 

There's an incredulous pause before Derek (Derek _fucking_ Hale, jesus) speaks. "Do we _know_ know each other? Are you actually one of the government men the Feds keep sending to my mom's farm?"

 

"No, no." Stiles gulps. "Just...never mind."

 

"But you know me. From the future."

 

"Well not personally!" Stiles huffs.

 

"But you know me."

 

Stiles stays silent for a moment before answering. "Look, it' probably not a great idea for me to spell out the future to you. That's a paradox, right?" He briefly thinks about the time his father made him sit through all three _Back to the Future_ movies. It had been a very, very long night. "We can change the future, right?"

 

"Maybe. But there are multiple theories of time travel..."

 

A shiver goes through Stiles and going through the entire history of time travel theory doesn't seem nearly as appealing as it did before. "I have to get out of the rain. It's colder than it looks."

 

"What, it doesn't rain in the future?"

 

 _Not much_ , Stiles thinks, but he doesn't say that out loud.

 

"Just tell me how to get to a warm bed and some food. Preferably food that will not bankrupt nor kill me."

 

Stiles thinks he hears Derek growl in displeasure, but it might just be the bad connection.

 

\---

 

To take the Bite is still considered a right but not a requirement of Citizenship in the North American Union in 2077. In the late 2050's, a fringe group of Wolves in the Global Corporate Congress attempted to force Bites for all occupants of major metropolitan areas. It was safer, they said, than leaving Unchanged humans to the mercies of the less developed Wolves in the cities. Any Unchanged would be required to leave their urban homes and make new lives in the smaller, less populated suburbs if they did not choose to take the Bite within six months. The Government would pick up the bill for the move, of course. Not every person could be expected to willingly take the Bite, and the Government understood the implication of mandatory Change on the Constitutional Rights of its Citizens

 

The Corporate Congress bill ultimately failed by a count of ten votes. Nothing like it was ever brought up to a vote again.

 

The North American Union abolished their Constitution two years later. To this day, the record of law is at the sole discretion of the Corporate Congress. 

 

\---

 

Stiles hacks into what Derek explains is an ATM ("In the future, we just swipe our arm, we don't need a freaking card!") and takes just enough money from a Mr. Jonathan Greenburg to tide him over for a couple days at what Derek promises is not the shittiest hotel in Beacon Hills. Stiles then pays for a sandwich and French fries at some sort of fast food restaurant that smells like bacon grease and charcoal.

 

"Stop whining," Derek says when Stiles voices his displeasure with the overwhelming scent. "You want to starve?"

 

"Please tell me this isn't gourmet cuisine in 2012. Because I'd rather just kill myself now and save my stomach the trouble of attempt to digest this sludge."

 

"Do you ever stop talking?"

 

Stiles smiles, taking another bite of the turkey sandwich. "Not really."

 

He chuckles when Derek groans. In a night that has been nothing but loss, it feels a little bit like a victory.

 


End file.
